US Patriot Tactical sees a big boost from higher uptime on BigCommerce

Military and law enforcement supplier scales with improved stability and mobile site

47%

17%

280%

100%

increase in online sales

increase in conversion

increase in mobile conversion

uptime during 2014 holiday season

Business goal

Boost sales and mobile conversion

US Patriot Tactical is a tactical goods retailer focused on building career-long relationships with their military and law enforcement customers. But hosting their online store on the Magento ecommerce platform resulted in weekly outages, making it difficult to retain existing customers and win new ones.

Paul Yoo, president & COO, recognized that providing a great website experience cultivates trust, so it pained him when his site went down. “When we were on Magento, our site was down about once a week over the course of three years,” said Yoo. “When customers see a 404 error, they lose trust and we lose the business.”

The US Patriot site also slowed to a crawl when traffic or shopping activity spiked — not the ideal experience for winning long-term customers. And their poorly converting mobile channel was crippling potential earnings.

To get the stability they needed to grow their business, the US Patriot team decided to move to a cloud-based ecommerce platform. After evaluating several options, they chose BigCommerce.

Topics Covered

BigCommerce benefit

Outstanding user experience and performance

The decision to move from self-hosting to BigCommerce’s cloud-based platform was the perfect solution to meet US Patriot Tactical’s platform stability needs. The team knew they could count on an outstanding uptime of more than 99.99%, plus unparalleled speed.

Moving to BigCommerce also eliminated the need for in-house technical maintenance, significantly reducing overhead. “We get a huge resource with the support team and an excellent platform to start from without having to pay for it all upfront,” said Yoo.

One of the first benefits US Patriot Tactical took advantage of on BigCommerce was the out-of-the-box mobile themes. The responsive design allows their mobile shoppers to easily browse, add to cart and check out — instead of waiting to get back to a computer to buy.

Since moving to BigCommerce, our site is now faster, the user experience is better and we have achieved a higher search rank — showing up as the number one result in organic listings on Google.Paul Yoo, President & COO

Big Results

Major mobile gains, rock-solid reliability

47%

17%

280%

100%

increase in online sales

increase in conversion

increase in mobile conversion

uptime during 2014 holiday season

Despite a downturn in their industry, US Patriot Tactical saw a 47% increase in revenue, 29% in transactions, and 17% in products ordered since moving to BigCommerce in 2013. The team no longer has to worry about major site outages, and even saw 100% uptime during the 2014 holiday season. They’ve also eliminated significant technology maintenance overhead, and saw a 17% increase in conversion rate due to 30% faster site speed.

Improvements to the company’s mobile shopping experience have have also paid major dividends. “On Magento, our mobile conversion rate was around 0.5%. Since moving to BigCommerce, it’s at 1.9%. This has been a huge improvement for us.”

In large part thanks to the rapid online growth, US Patriot Tactical is now ranked #637 on the prestigious Internet Retailer Second 500 list.